Highly engaged, community-focused, and opinionated, how can you be sure your ads break through on a platform where the skepticism of advertisers runs high?

Whether you're new to Reddit advertising or looking to improve your existing strategy, creating effective and engaging ads requires a deep understanding of the platform's culture and user behavior. More importantly, it takes a commitment to testing, optimizing, and iterating to ensure your ad hits all the right notes for your audience (spoiler: we have a way to cut down the time and cost of that part significantly).

Let’s touch on some of the best practices to get you there and how CulturePulse can play a big part in speeding up the process.

Know your audience and speak to what they care about

First things first, and no matter which platform you’re on, you need to know who you’re talking to and where they are.

On Reddit, that means finding your subreddit.

With over 3 million subreddits and 100,000 active communities, the beautiful thing about the platform is that you can endlessly niche down and get your messages in front of exactly who you want to see them.

A great ad in the wrong community is useful as a fork for soup.

Reddit is synonymous with community, and with CulturePulse you can both find your community and speak to the specific topics that keep them engaged.

With built-in audience and topic analysis tools, you can gauge everything from emotional sentiment to if they’d make good brand ambassadors or potential lifetime buyers, in addition to pinpointing exactly what they’re talking about.

So, not only will you be able to understand your audience better, you’ll also be able to see the exact words they’re using in real-time and at a glance.

Create copy for Redditors

More than any other digital space, Reddit has its own lingo, and your community will have its own jargon too.

Mirror it.

The only way to show you truly understand your audience is to speak their language and the platform's language authentically.

As Reddit themselves note in their best practices guide, ”that means leaning into “Redditisms” or language and acronyms created by our users and uniquely found on Reddit.” A few examples; TL;DR (too long; didn’t read), TIL (today I learned), ELI5 (explain like I’m 5), and YSK (you should know).

Don’t overdo it, though or you’ll quickly find yourself in cringe territory.

And if you’re unsure how to write for Redditors, ask our AI-powered writing tool to create the copy for you from just a few simple pieces of information. You’ll get a crystal clear Resonance Score, which measures how well your message might connect with your audience – the higher the score, the better the potential connection.

Test, optimize, and scale

Does doing all of the above guarantee that your messages will connect with your audience?

Not really.

The only way to know what truly moves the needle and resonates is to get the ads out in front of them, look at the metrics, measure the engagement, monitor conversions and incrementally adjust accordingly.

You’ll want to run A/B tests and see which version gets a better response, and as you sharpen your messaging through repeated tests, you can invest more in the ads that work to expand your reach.

The trouble is, the testing doesn’t come cheap.The creative has a cost, running ads isn’t free, and the priciest part of all is the time that goes into both.

With CulturePulse, you can avoid all of that and A/B test your Reddit ads against a replica of your exact target audience. This digital twin audience is created by aggregating and analyzing the conversations in actual Reddit communities, meaning you can instantly test your messages with zero risk.

Remember, our built-in AI writer can even write the copy for you.

Test, fine-tune, retest, and run the ad to your real audience only after it hits the right notes.

Optimizing that would ordinarily take weeks, and a nice chunk of ad spend now takes minutes.

With these tips in tow, it’s time to get to the fun part, building your ads. Like every network, Reddit has its quirks and ways of doing things; creating compelling ads means understanding those and truly meeting your audience in their space. Tools like CulturePulse make that easier.

Get started for free.